The HubSpot Culture Code [slides]

> FBI documents accessed by journalists via a freedom of information request revealed that HubSpot attempted "multiple failed attempts to manipulate and extort people” with the intention of stopping the book's publication.

> HubSpot executives considered the book "a financial threat to HubSpot, its share price, and the company’s future potential."

I'm including this because this book was published in 2016. While I'm sure that HubSpot, its employees, and management may have learned some things about integrity and transparency since then, it's probably not enough to be writing this soap-boxy slide deck that announces that software built around their culture is going to solve their problems.

On the other hand, I do believe software can shape and guide a culture but only if the culture is also at the pilot seat behind that software. That's to say, as long as the implementors of said software are not interested in developing a certain culture. Your employees will inevitably decide what software gets used and what software gets circumvented, the byproduct of which becomes what people colloquially refer to as culture.

Culture comes from everywhere. When you recruit gay people, some of the values of gay people trickle into your company. When you recruit Black people, values of Black folks trickle in. When you recruit from universities those values trickle in. Each of those will shape your culture and those people are not monoliths either, they're mixes of many vibrant and dark experiences. The last part is key, recruiting is one aspect, but your company culture will continue to evolve and I see projects like this as software trying to drive culture (what the C-suite wants) instead of culture driving software that it maintains itself.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/books/review/disrupted-by...

[2] https://www.samueljscott.com/2018/12/19/hubspot-fbi-report

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Work to make a living | Work to make a difference | Nope [1]

Follow explicit instructions | Chart the course | Depends on the role [2]

Juggle work and life | Harmonize work and life | Sounds like: never stop working

Commute into work | Connect to work from anywhere | Sounds like: never stop working

Value amazing perks | Value amazing people | I like people, even unamazing ones

I think only someone who has lost their sense of distinction between their work and their life can write these out as ideals. I.e. A startup founder.

[1] I am not knocking making a difference, but that isn't the organizational imperative of any business. And it is a dangerous delusion to say it is.

[2] I learnt a lot following orders at different times

Edits: not sure I'm going to figure this tabulation out

Here's the main problem with having a culture code:

It's often created and agreed upon by a clique of employees who've been working there for years - newcomers get a say inversely proportional to the number of employees they encountered on their first day.

The best culture I participated in was in a project where we were all contractors in a freshly formed team - working remotely at that, with no code of conduct aside from maybe "don't be an asshole" - enforced by our leader, who was by the way great at her job.

I'm still in touch with these people even though we were disbanded after six months and that was there years ago.

Yes, it's a slide deck -- but think of it as a template.

Shared with the community with love.

I am from New York and spend most of my time in Colombia. My English speaking New York personality and Spanish speaking Colombian personality have diverged quite significantly.

I am a lot more indirect in Spanish. I'll rarely say "no" in Spanish for example. I'll always try to rephrase it as "yes, but we could also..." or "maybe we could...".

The "we seek the truth and face facts" mentality works well for some cultures and not as great for others.

I question the idea that a company should have a single culture. Might be better to aim to be a place where folks from a variety of cultures can collaborate.

Its actually nothing i want anymore; There are many reasons why people earn a certain amount of money but being involved in that process in a company wide group setting was horrible annoying and didn't make me feel any better.

And on my salary discussion, it was mentioned what extra perks i got from the company and that amounted to a certain amount which suddenly meant "Look we give you less money because we think it increases the social factor if we force you to be in our company on a day with everyone else to eat together etc. in a forced social setting, which was nice don't get me wrong, by you paying indirectly.

And thats the issue, either the company is paying for it, or you don't do it.

At the end of the day, you can easily find nice people you wana hang around with while you work in plenty of normal companies. Just make sure you find a good Team.

And yes all those things they do it for 2 reasons: 1. keeping employees 2. getting new employees. Being a little bit of edgy might just be cheaper than paying head hunters and if you can take unlimited good people but you just don't get them, every person going through your door because of all this hipness, is one person more earning money for you.

Expect loads of cynicism. I've found that talking about having Principles and Integrity in business and professional endeavors, usually results in being accused of "virtue signaling," which is ridiculous, as we are only talking about simple, basic, realistic human values; not some kind of Mother Theresa code.

That said, it is extremely easy to let a focus on "culture" turn into a toxic monoculture. It's always easier to exclude those that deviate from the norm, than it is to adapt to them.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gn5kwQaMFQ

why not have "unlimited salaries" too -- one just writes themselves a check to what one thinks he deserves

I obtained the FBI's redacted report following its investigation into your company. The full PDF is available here: https://www.samueljscott.com/2018/12/19/hubspot-fbi-report/

HubSpot has always stated that the company believes in transparency. But HubSpot has never directly and specifically addressed the serious, material allegations in Lyons' book and has never disclosed exactly what the mentioned executives — among others — may have done regarding his book.

So, I ask you:

Will HubSpot grant me, for my column for The Drum, a one-hour interview with you, Brian Halligan, and the chair of your board of directors? Completely recorded and on the record and with nothing off-limits.

I get it if you're telegraphing that you just don't think they'll fit with you team, but having seen a lot of culture interviews in practice, they seem to be more socially acceptable code for "they're not gender conforming in profession, preference or practice", "they're not white", or what have you.

I can vouch for what the deck mentions. They conduct the business with love and care for the people in the company as well as the customers.

The company puts a lot of care and dedication to make the people grow. They conduct themselves with care and appreciation for each other.

I feel a bit jealous of how much this company values employees, I wish all companies were like this one. For what I see, this deck is not thin air. I see how it is fulfilled everyday in my wife, and I am personally grateful for this.

I work for a living, I volunteer and work in my community to make a difference.

1. The deck is a good recruiting tool. Once you're past the start-up phase and are a scale-up this matters a lot.

2. Cynicism of such decks is understandable because it is just words and culture often reflects the founders' values. As such we were lucky that Dharmesh and Brian are among the highest integrity folks I've worked with who solve for the company always and never for themselves.

The value of the deck for other companies may be encouraging a thoughtful discussion about what kind of culture they want and providing an opportunity to critically evaluate leadership who tacitly set the day-to-day culture.

tl;dr - Like any job, HubSpot was both a good and bad experience for me. Disrupted is 25% accurate, 65% embellished garbage, and 10% Dan's ego. The Culture Code is at its core aspirational marketing collateral, but it's more true than not true.

So, funnily enough, I started around the same time as Dan Lyons and was also smuggled in through the back door by the founders. I read Disrupted and agree with parts of it, but also disagree with many other parts of it. My takeaway is that Dan had a huge ego and went in there knowing he'd write a negative, satirical book about his experience. Why the founders let a fox into the hen house is another discussion.

Also, I haven't read this latest version of the Culture Code, but I have read previous versions and know the gist.

My job at HubSpot was to actively try to "disrupt the company from within." The entire team for the first year was myself and one other person. We built a "startup" inside the company to mimic what an outside startup would do to try to kill HubSpot. We started with a Wordpress plugin called Leadin and it pretty much worked. With our plugin, Wordpress, and Mailchimp's (new at the time) marketing automation, you could replace all of HubSpot's two lowest plans for $80/month vs. $800/month. We also leveraged a touchless/freemium sales model, which was diametrically opposed to HubSpot's inside sales model at the time. That meant, we could underprice them by an order of magnitude with working unit economics (aka we didn't have to pay the CAC of a sales person.)

As you can imagine when you're trying to destroy a company from the inside, you develop a healthy dose of skepticism for "the other side." I would even say that I had a near identical mindset to Dan Lyons that first year, thinking, "this is a cult" and "how does no one realizes how great all the stuff we're working on is while most of their stuff is crappy?"

About a year in, I almost quit. But I really believed in what we were building and didn't want to give up on it just yet. So instead of writing every one off as stupid, I decided to get to actually know the rest of the company. And guess what? They were all genuinely good people who were just trying to do their jobs well to grow the company and help customers. Really, the problem was me and my pessimistic attitude. Once I took the time to actually build relationships, people started to want to work with our team more. We got more resources. There was an excitement about what we were working on by people who wanted to help it grow. It took some educational effort, but eventually the rest of the company started to understand product-led growth.

My time there ended on both a high point where our product was launched on the stage at the company conference as HubSpot's new freemium marketing offering, but I was also severely burnt out from the internal politics I had to deal with to get there. I quit about two years to go work on my own company where I actually had real ownership.

I think they've since learned how to help the "founder types" wrap up their personalities into their projects (which they don't actually own...) succeed more internally. There are choices I could have made differently that would have helped me succeed better too.

But if I had to do it all over again, I would. I learned a ridiculous amount about how to actually run a company and made some good friends along the way.

Like all companies, HubSpot has its flaws and makes trade-offs. But I can without a doubt say that it's genuinely a thoughtful company run by compassionate people who care about their employees and customers.

Dharmesh Shah is also one of the highest-quality human beings I've had the privilege to get to know over the years. I'm positive he's reading every single comment in this thread, taking it to heart and is earnestly mulling it over.

Oh wait... it’s just some shitty CRM SaaS. I almost took it seriously.

I pity those non-manager and non-engineer HubSpot employees who had to suffer through this presentation, because at least managers and engineers tend to be compensated generously.